Tuesday, August 18, 2009

We've Got Sheetrock



Here are a few pictures of the new ceiling on the second floor. Not yet mudded and taped but well on its way.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

New Installment Of Arty Pix




What We Did On Our Day Off


Sleeping on the beach, sailing with old friends in Blue Hill Bay or learning to bake maple cream pie... believe me we never stopped thinking about the building and all of the work we should have been doing... yeah right

The Old Waterworks

This is an amazing spot just below mill number 5 where the canal exits the building. No longer in use but still beautiful.

Monday, August 3, 2009

FINDING THE FLOOR




We knew that somewhere under all of this super old linoleum from probably 1946 that there must be WOOD. We didn't know it would end up being the dirtiest job yet. But someone's gotta do it!! And thanks to Barry and Thomas and their seemingly endless energy, we found it! The process may seem a bit comfusing but it was essentially a 3 part process. First we peeled up the linoleum and unfortunately it left behind its rather thick paper backing. Next there was a lot of ripping, pulling and scraping. What was left was a gross piney smelling adhesive. We at first thought we could sand it but then on one of those really hot and humid days it turned back to goo. So Barry did some research and found out we could dissolve it with hot water. So we painstakingly pour boiling water on 12 inch square rags to hold in the heat and after a few minutes we lifted it and quickly scraped before it turned back to glue. So low and behold we have a wood floor, one square foot at a time.
This is the stairwell where it comes up into the second floor. We thought that taking out this overbuilt wood strapping structure would do too much damage to the old horse hair plaster underneath. Rather than be stuck with a giant holey mess that would need a tone of patching we thought we could reuse the strapping and sheet rock over it. But our desire to get back to the bones of the building got to us and Barry yanked it off the wall!! Much to our suprise half of the brick and most of the plaster DIDN'T come off with the 3 inch nails they used to put it up. 

Executive Lunch Room

Removing The Freight







On Friday we had a local guy named Joey come to take out the elevator. The shaft goes from the basement to the second floor, and apparently used to be used to move pianos and organs when there was a repair shop on the upper level. Its unfortunate that we couldn't keep it but it was a serious liability and would have needed tons of repairs and tons of dollars to bring it up to code, seeing that it was nothing but a chain hoist that lifted the carriage. So here you can see the cafe space with boxed out elevator in the back center (blue doors) and the second floor studio space with the elevator coming up into the middle of it. The rest is pretty self explanatory. Now all we have to do is deal with a rather large hole in the floor that frighteningly goes three floors down.

The Some-what Master Bedroom


This a a series of photos that show the progression of the master-ish bedroom. The early ones are from before we bought it, and now only 6 weeks later it looks like this. As you can see the bar has been removed and filled in with a custon shelf unit. The scary floor length curtains that were left behind have disappeared. We also put a new coat of slightly lighter brown in a semi-gloss finish on all of the wainscoating just to bright it up a few notches. The only thing left to do is mop the floor! Of course in the future we would rather loose the wood panelling and drop ceiling but in an effort to save some money at this point in the project we decided opening that can of worms could be dangerous.